How modern-day 'liberals' are destroying the idea of liberalism

Socialism may be dead almost everywhere across the globe, but its message lives on in 'liberal’ circles on the modern centre-left in western Europe, the United States and even in India.

The modern centre-left behaves like a socially liberal version of the old Left, often standing up for freedom of expression, rights of LGBT communities, rights of women, social justice and so on. You couldn’t really call it progressive though. And you couldn’t differentiate it from the Right at times.

As vocal as the Left is about social and socioeconomic issues, it loves minorityism more than ever. But even minorityism is not universally practiced by left intellectuals and demagogues. Minorityism becomes particularly important when religious minorities are the subject matter. And if the religion is Islam, you dare not raise your voice.

Yes, it’s incredible how the modern Left dramatically loses its courage when some tenets of Islam on which terrorists base their actions, are questioned. The debate immediately devolves into allegations of racism (never mind that Islam is not a race, it’s a religion).

Racism is a well-used word here. It shuts down the conversation because racism is such a taboo especially in western societies now. Unfortunately, the common public seems to readily swallow the idea that a people equal their religion - which is to say that human beings are indistinguishable from the ideology they might espouse. This conflation of people with faith is devastating to constructive discussion. No one stops to think that human beings are not ideas themselves - or that ideas are not human beings.

So then we are sold the meme of 'Islamophobia' - a word which (again) conflates criticism of modern Islam with anti-Muslim hatred. It is true that the latter exists in all modern societies and is a social problem. But even if you mistakenly term 'terrorism’ as 'Islamic terrorism’, the liberals pounce on you, calling you a racist and a bigot who hates Muslims.

I have sometimes been asked to replace the term 'Islamic terrorism’ with 'Islamist terrorism’, but we often hear that 'terrorism has no religion’. If you suggest that certain tenets of the faith may have been interpreted literally to justify terror, you are shouted down. There is a blissful belief that no religion can ever preach any bad idea, no matter how ancient the religion may be or how redundant its texts may be. Large masses of people - liberals - still believe all religions are intrinsically good and contain a great deal of wisdom. So much so that such wisdom is unquestionable. The modern world just doesn’t understand religion it seems.

Related Read: Fighting religious fundamentalism: How societies can tackle extremist ideologies

But the problem does not end here. The modern Left resorts to cultural relativism when confronted with the idea that certain beliefs espoused by Islamists may not be compatible with modern society. 'Their culture is different, you can’t judge it by western standards’ is the kind of thing we hear. This has become a huge problem - in the UK underage girls are being married off by their Asian parents, some Muslims practice genital mutilation and Hindus female foeticide. There isn’t much control over what faith schools teach children, or what kind of rules they impose (like enforcing sex segregation). In the UK multiculturalism has come to mean a license for cultural isolation. Meanwhile, pro-ISIS hate preachers like Anjem Choudary can freely hold an 'Islamic road show', call the hijackers of 9/11 the 'Magnificent 19', appear on television debates and incite Muslims to violence. 

In India, we still have a Muslim Personal Law Board which won’t reject triple talaq or agree to any kind of common civil law. The problem is accentuated by the so-called liberals who are quick to accuse critics of racism and anti-Muslim bigotry. It’s incredible that regulating madrassa education to include science and mathematics is labelled 'anti-Muslim'.

Two things come to mind here - betrayal and cowardice. Liberalism has betrayed itself by turning back on its own principles, instead going all out to 'protect’ minorities indiscriminately. If such 'protection’ were to involve freedom from fear and violence (which was the original mandate of the Left on minorities of all kinds) one should have been full of praise for the Left. But this is simply not the case. Instead, promotion of minority rights has come to mean wilful ignorance of backwardness, violence and intolerance among sections of minority communities. The Left cowers in fear against the idea of a minority backlash.

The liberals and the Leftists, who were originally meant to be the great emancipators, rationalists and freethinkers, who were to stand up against backwardness and religious extremism, who were supposed to be the vanguards of scientific and material progress, have now abandoned their post in the name of minorityism. Their bigotry is matched only by their visceral opponents on the Right. The only difference between the Left and the Right now seems to be that the Right is aggressive and openly racist, xenophobic, homophobic, bigoted and sexist, while the Left is hypocritical, cowardly and uses obscurantism and cultural relativism to achieve its ends. The ends though, have become quite similar.

The situation has grown tense to the point where true liberalism and progressivism have met with surprising backlash from the Left and the liberals themselves. This greviously harms the efforts of reformists and true liberals who really believe in freedom of expression, vibrant democratic societies and social equality. Those who call for reforming religion for example, are subjected to slander, endless misrepresentation, abusive rants, derision and mudslinging. As I said above, they face allegations of racism and bigotry and are left in the cold to deny these accusations before a gullible public.

Let’s use an example. Those who insist that the West is entirely responsible for ISIS or Al-Qaeda (or 9/11), or who refuse to acknowledge that certain religious doctrines may be harmful when taken literally, seriously impair the cause of social reformers who work relentlessly to lift whole populations out of ignorance, superstition, backwardness and savagery. By refusing to call terrorism Islamic, for example, they deprive reformers of a lexicon to begin their efforts towards change. If you can’t say terrorism has anything at all to do with religious doctrine, how do you change people’s views? How do you convince them that jihad does not have to mean conquest of other lands, and that their religion can be interpreted in a positive way? Claiming that 'these terrorists are not Muslims’ or 'Al-Qaeda/ISIS has nothing to do with Islam’ is counterproductive because it leaves no basis for addressing the problem. How do reformists reform if we don’t know what it is that needs reforming? Worse, how do you convince non-Muslims that what we are talking about isn’t Islam itself, but a particularly literal and violent interpretation of the faith? How do you then stop non-Muslims from turning against Muslims, believing that it is Islam which is the problem?

This is how radicalisation takes root in multiple societies - by creating a chain of mistrust and hatred against the 'other'.

Moreover, the Left’s hypocrisy also affects minorities within minorities. Those most affected by Islamic terrorism, for example, are Muslims themselves. But the worst affected among them are women, children, gay people, apostates, freethinkers and the like. They have nowhere to turn to because even as the savages seek to destroy them, the Leftists and liberals make the perpetrators look like the victims. The Left has betrayed large swathes of its own constituency.

In the West, liberal reformist Muslims like Maajid Nawaz, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani (among others) are now frequently accused of being 'neo-conservatives' - of secretly running a western governments’ agenda to defame and dehumanise Muslims in order to sustain the 'war on terror’. Universities in the UK provide platforms to 'guest lecturers’ who are actually radicals with dubious linkages to foreign Islamist groups. On the other hand, an Asra Nomani finds no support when she tries to create space in a mosque for women to pray alongside men, or when an apostate like Maryam Namazie is banned from speaking at a western university.

Such shameful double standards now dominate the discourse on the Regressive Left, even as neo-Nazi and Far Right parties continue to win increasing support in western Europe, or as Hindu fundamentalists murder rationalists and seriously attempt to throw a fairly open and pluralistic Indian society back in time. If you are a true liberal at heart who believes in real secularism, open dialogue and cross-cultural social prosperity, you are now hated by the Right AND the Left. You are now a pariah.